Anti-Semitism in Copenhagen

Another day, another newspaper story about anti-Semitism in Europe. The good news, I suppose, is that there are at least some newspapers in Europe that are willing to acknowledge the phenomenon. The bad news is that there's more than enough material to keep the stories coming.

The latest report, in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, is about seventeen-year-old Moran Jacob, a Jewish boy who until recently lived in Nørrebro, a heavily Muslim neighborhood of Copenhagen. Back in January, Jacob agreed to testify at a hearing about anti-Semitism at Copenhagen's City Hall, where he told about the harassment he's been subjected to since childhood. At the time, several newspapers provided accounts of his testimony. (Representatives of Islamic organizations were invited to attend the hearing, but chose not to.)

The son of a Muslim father and an Israeli Jewish mother, Jacob began his education at a private Muslim school, where he was bullied because of his Jewish background and had to keep his distance from the other kids during recess. When he was transferred to a regular school, the abuse grew even worse; it wasn't even safe for him to walk home alone. In eighth grade, his teacher told him to say that he was Palestinian and that his mother was Russian. "I had to lie about who I was," he recalls. But it didn't work. They knew. Eventually, a group of his classmates ganged up on him and stabbed him in the leg. "You can't go here anymore," his teacher said. "I have scars," he told the hearing. "Not on my body, but on my soul."